Review of Hunter x Hunter: The Last Mission

Story-4 The story is nothing to write home about. It's pretty obvious Togashi wasn't involved in this movie because of how flat the plot is. There's nothing particularly surprising or really emotional about this movie. The movie tries really hard to get you to sympathize with the villains but it's very sloppily done. More on that down below. Art-9 The art style felt slightly different in this movie compared to the rest of HxH, but I can't put my finger on how. Overall, the art just felt a lot sharper and fresher than Phantom Rouge, to the point where I was amazed the two movies came out inthe same year. The movie just looks *glorious.* While the first half hour or so of the movie off-screened most of the fights, the later half 100% made up for it. I loved all of the flashy particle effects, both CG and hand-drawn. There's a lot of effort put into details like hair movement and facial expressions, a lot of use of foreshortening and camera movement in action shots that adds to the energy of fight scenes, and a real sense of speed and motion that you don't see in most anime. Every punch or attack really looks like it packs force and impact.

If there's one problem I had with the art, it's that it made the characters seem to be way stronger than they are in the anime. Due to the animators' glee for using up this movie's clearly titanic budget, there's tons of explosions and flashy effects for every attack. One important aspect of Hunter x Hunter was how grounded it generally is: Gon has no right to be punching hard enough to bust human-sized holes through 10 inch-thick concrete walls and make dust clouds the size of small buildings.
Because of this flashiness, the fights just felt like generic shonen, with everyone jumping around spamming lasers and energy blasts at each other like something out of Dragon Ball, instead of Hunter x Hunter's usual style of more mentally and psychologically intense battles.
Another minor issue is how far the movie's original characters stray from Togashi's art style. All of the antagonists look like generic anime villains.

Sound-6
I'm not an expert on SFX or anything but they didn't sound too weird. The OSTs were all taken from the anime.

Character-5
Gon and Killua don't develop in any way in this movie. It tries to develop the villains more instead, but it was really poorly thrown together- a few flashbacks of their "sad" backstories didn't make me feel anything at all for them. How on Earth does the movie expect us to sympathize with sociopathic murderers who slaughtered hundreds of people without mercy?

Enjoyment- 6
The flashy fight scenes made up for the shoddy plot to a certain degree. In any case, it was great just to see Gon and Killua on-screen again.